I was all in favor of covering this game until this very moment, when I realized I had to write this post and didn’t have anything to say that I didn’t already say on the show. I have a PS4. I could get this game and play through it now. But I’m way too busy as it is. I’m not sure what I’ll put in these entries as the series goes on.

Honestly its not really scary, its got some kinda spooky moments but mostly its just playing off tropes of the genre.

I *HATE* horror games/movies. Cant watch them, dont watch them, wont watch them. But i played this with some friends and it was fine. There were only two scenes that made me uncomfortable and they weren’t that bad really.

As Josh said in the episode, everyone can live or everyone can die. There’s more than those two options though – you could have, say Teens 1, 3 and 6 live, or maybe 2, 4 and 6-8. I’m not sure if every single combination is possible, as the death of one could lead to the death of another later, but there’s many options available.

It’s also possible for any one of the characters to be the Sole Survivor (not in the Fallout sense), so no one death guarantees another. It is possible for the actions of some characters to kill other characters though, sometimes in rather obscure ways.

So about the obscurity thing, I haven’t played the game myself and don’t really intend to but I’ve seen partial LPs and it seemed that a large number of choices feel pretty much random on the first/blind playthrough? From the comments it seemed like the actual game is more of a meta thing where the player goes through it multiple times figuring out which choices are critical and how they combine so that they can then try for certain results?

I think the Mt. Washington in the game is fictitious, named after Josh’s family, who own it. It is in Canada though: one of the notes you can find mentions Calgary, so it’s probably somewhere in Alberta.

I love the totem mechanic in this game. Aside from adding actual gameplay to the interactive movie experience, as they require you to pay attention long-term and try to recognize and avoid/seek out the shown situations as they come up, they also work great as an exploration reward.

In a game like this, where there’s no ammo, health drinks or other resources to worry about, exploring the levels is disincentivized: you always want to find the quickest way to your goal and move on, instead of combing through side paths where you might get a scare or get your dude’s head loped off. But with totems, you want to find them to be forewarned about upcoming dangers and opportunities, and that’s enough to make exploration totally worthwhile again, and let the devs use them as bait for additional scares.

That, and the developers did a lot of clever things just with the placement of the totems in order to screw with you.

A minor non spoilery example: One of the first totems you find depicts something that can only happen at the end of the game, but the context in which you find it(it involves fire just after you’ve been asked to try and burn something) makes you think that it’s going to happen in the immediate future. It puts you on edge for the whole rest of the sequence, making you nervous about completing an otherwise very simple objective.

Hidden YouTube feature for getting freeze-frames:
– K pauses or unpauses regardless of what else you click on (unlick spacebar, which sometimes brings you down to the comment section)
– J goes back a bit (10 seconds, it looks like)
– L goes forward a bit (10s)
– comma goes back a frame
– period goes forward a frame

I’ll also note that the left and right arrow keys also go back/forward, by 5 seconds instead of 10. The frame-by-frame will be very useful for reading through text that I need to pause to catch, like the totem descriptions here.

I wonder if they’re going to play this like The Walking Dead season, making the less popular decisions to see how and if things turn out differently? Though it might be to Shamus’ benefit if they go for a more ‘vanilla’ experience, so he can experience the story as most people did (without playing it).

I’d like to see most of the decisions made by the people who haven’t played the game (Shamus, Mumbles), like we did in the psychologist scene. As opposed to than basing the decisions on some foreknowledge of how things turn out if we follow a given path.

I think this is a really good kind of game for Spoiler Warning’s style. Very heavy on the story, setting, and atmosphere, very light on the mechanics. Plenty of thematic and narrative stuff to talk about, not much of a gameplay loop for the cast to get bored with. Have you guys considered doing visual novels? They’re sort of like this, except it’s a book-game instead of a movie-game. Are they just too long?

I think experience-style Point & Click Adventure games like this with 3d models are just a good fit for let’s plays in general. You get downtime to talk, you get visuals and story to talk about, you get to fight over decisions, all good stuff. It’s like RPGs without the game part, which can be bad if you’re looking to get your story with some gameplay, but it’s wonderful for let’s playing something with a substantial story that also isn’t tens of hours long. A let’s play of Persona 4 or Deadly Premonition grinds to a half every other hours when the lovely character interaction has to stop in order to kill monsters in a dungeon. Or whenever there hasn’t been a shooter section in Mass Effect for a while. You don’t need to worry about that with The Walking Dead.

Visual novels don’t have the same readability, quite literally. With Mystic Messenger, there was no VA, so you as the watcher need to read everything. There’s also little happening visually to talk about. I think it totally works, but there are comments on that page that didn’t love the format because you can’t necessarily watch them the same way you watch the other videos. I had similar complaints with kotor, which was incomprehensible in its combat system, had really tiny text and fictional languages instead of English VA now and then. It’s more difficult to watch. So while I would love for SW to play Phoenix Wright, Tsukihime or Steins;Gate I get why they wouldn’t besides that not being their tastes.

This makes me think that a game like Zero Time Dilemma might be the perfect fit for the Spoiler Warning format. The game is heavy on story and decisions, but also contains puzzle rooms that could serve as downtime without being repetitive and boring. Unlike most visual novels, all of the story sections are entirely voice acted, which will make it easier for viewers to follow along.

I’m really glad that Shamus and Mumbles don’t know what’s gonna happen in the game. I feel we will get a lot better reaction out of them on a blind run for a crazy game like this. I really look forward to their responses to certain plot events as the occur in real time.

The game mostly looks amazing, but it has a strong uncanny valley effect. Some of the animations that aren’t mocapped look REALLY janky and stick out like a sore thumb. Watch the scene after Hannah inspects the bottle of alcohol, and check out bad the animation is when Hannah pats Josh’s arm. It’s pretty bad. And in some scenes you can really see the framerate tank. Even with that though, this is easily one of the best looking games I have ever seen.

Oh, the therapist had some serious uncanny going on – his face is just a bit more expressive and rubbery than it should be. I’m not sure that’s not intended, though. I think he’s supposed to be creepy.

The way the flesh moves is actually really good: they’re capturing a lot of little subtleties about how lips work and such that you don’t often even see in the CG faces in Hollywood movies. And it’s way more impressive than LA Noir since it’s actual mesh animation, and not simply the point-cloud equivalent of FMV (seriously: I still have no idea why anyone was actually impressed by LA Noir from a tech standpoint).

But Stromare in particular was clearly being directed to go waaaaaayyyyyyyyy overboard with his facial expressions. Like, you can tell the director straight-up told him “This is all about showing off our animation tech, so crank all those movements up to 11, OK? Don’t worry about how it looks, just pretend you’re wearing clown makeup or something.”

I was actually really surprised no one brought it up in the video. They kept gushing over the mo-cap, but never even acknowledged the old-school Jim Carrey level of mugging going on. Seriously, it’s like that stuff was directed by Dr. Ziodberg’s crazy uncle.

But also the sub-surface scattering is super exaggerated. That’s really common both in games/CG and with live action silicon rubber FX. Yes, skin is translucent, but it isn’t nearly that kind of “jello with some milk mixed in” translucent.

It might have had to be Jim Carrey-levels of hamming, in the same way that his costume in The Grinch worked with him while Mike Myers entirely borked up The Cat in the Hat; it might not have worked so well if he’d been less hammy with it since it wouldn’t come across as much.

If that were true, then it wouldn’t look all gonzo exaggerated in the final product, it’d just look normal. The exaggeration would be mostly lost in the animation process, like how an actor’s facial movements get attenuated by rubber appliances, turning the compensatory exaggeration into a normal-looking performance.

The fact that his face is doing huge, goofy cartwheels through every expression in the final product means they went waaaaaaayyyyy further than was necessary for compensation’s sake. No matter how much is hypothetically being lost, they still overshot by a mile and landed right back in the uncanny valley.

No, I think this is more like how in the early days of color movies, filmmakers went crazy with big, garish colors everywhere (or like how 3D movies are constantly doing poke-you-in-the-eye gimmick shots). There’s often an initial period with new tech where producers think they have to cram it like a cheap gimmick in order to justify it.

@Billy “Dosbilliam” Inlow:
My post above should have been written as an agreement with you, not an attempted rebuttal. My emotions got ahead of me, and somehow got me reading what you wrote the wrong way around the first time. My bad.

It’s possible they told him to exaggerate, and he went that overboard on his own, or that the director for that cutscene was a different guy than the director for the other scenes. The teens’ performances don’t seem exaggerated the way Stromare’s is, so clearly something was going on.

My guess is that, even taking into account what I said above, the overacting was intentional, possibly for the reasons I stated, or maybe to increase how creepy he was to properly set the mood for the rest of the game. :P

Early colourised (and colour) films had garish colours because that’s what Hollywood actually used at the time. When film was black-and-white, costumes were frequently chosen because of how they appeared in greyscale, not how they appeared in reality. Garish orange, in greyscale, appears as a shade of grey that was exactly what the filmmakers wanted, and so they used it. And costume design took a while to catch up when colour film became widespread.

The faces still look very uncanny to me.* Mostly, I think it’s the skin, teeth and eyeballs. The skin looks like it’s made out of shiny rubber, but viewed through a romance-filter lens (soft, blurry lighting). The eyes and teeth are also too shiny; They don’t look wet, they just look like they’re made out of glass. The close-ups of the hands in Fallout 4 when you grab your Pip-Boy looked the same way.

I just realized after editing this the second time, that the psych’s hands in this game fix one mistake that Fallout 4 hadn’t got right yet – they’ve got ambient occlusion on the fingernails/fingers. In Fallout 4, there was an abrupt lighting shift from the shiny nails, to the dull skin, ignoring the fact that the skin would be changing the light coming to the nails, since it’s right beside them.

* It wasn’t as bad far away, and in the outdoor scenes, but that psychiatrist’s office was really bad.

“The skin looks like it's made out of shiny rubber, but viewed through a romance-filter lens (soft, blurry lighting).”
Blame compression.

Josh records using a lossy format (otherwise the video would eat up all his disk space).
Then he edits it, using a NLE (non linear editor) hopefully to ensure as little re-compression occurs as possible.
Then he uploads it to youtube, which decodes the video and re-encodes it.
And then when you watch the video it’s decoded a final time.

With modern codes the decoder also adds to the image quality.
And youtube never streams the original uploaded video, it’s always re-encoded.
So when you watch a youtube video you are watching a 3rd generation encoding most likely (with 3 levels of compression/decompression artifacts).

Even at 1080p this does damage the video. And while many have started upscaling and uploading at 1440p or even 2160p to give the youtube compressor more pixels to work with, even then there are still compression artifacts seen. And very few play/record video at native 1440p or 2160p yet.

“they've got ambient occlusion on the fingernails/fingers” Until Dawn is much more scripted than Fallout 4 so I’m sure they squeezed out as much as possible from the PS4 as they could in all cut-scenes.

As to the uncanny valley thing. I think they cross it and are climbing the other side in tis game metaphorically speaking.
There is a slight comic/cell-shaded feel to the art style (similar to Fallout 4).
However I suspect that the 30FPS frame rate may make the animation more jerky than it would be at 60FPS or higher.
Since we know so well how a human “moves” a low framerate may make it seem robotic. And the game engine itself has less transition frames between simulated muscle and joint movements.

I love the artstyle of this game. It’s very realistic graphics that don’t, at least to me, look uncanny. It’s not just that they are based on attractive actors. Mass Effect has that too, I think, although perhaps they were models. Maybe it’s just five years of polishing and the new generation, but the characters look exceptionally good. Peter Stormare is outrageous, so much fun to watch. Sam (who I get the impression is the female lead) is possibly the most beautiful video game character I can think of off the top of my head, and that’s all from looking like a real person. I’m presuming Mike(who I get the impression is the male lead) is similarly attractive, but I wouldn’t know.

Regarding characters, all awesome. There are a few moments of uncanny valley here and there. But the art-style manages to hold back the rains (so they don’t look plastic).
Stormare’s character though could probably have benefited from dialing back the facial expressing 25-50% though and it would still have look very animated.

Although it is possible the over exaggerated animation is intentional and is how the person with the cap see Stormare’s character

I wonder what the backstory of the game development is.
Was this a tech demo for the PS4 initially?
I do seem to recall that Sony was surprised how popular the game became, and did not really maket it at all initially (which is really weird considering the very high production values).

The conditions are pretty much the same in Norway, it’s all night and then one big sunrise/sunset during the day from like 7 to 5. Then in the middle of July, it’s like four hours of darkness tops. I didn’t know America was any different.

I’m too far south, on the longest night (~Dec. 21) is about 5:30pm sunset in Texas, but that’s the absolute longest. And then in summer long days of sunset at 9:30 pm. i think you Scandinavians get it much worse than we do though.

Oh HECK yes. I grew up in England, which is a bit south of Scandinavia, and during the winter, when I was working 9-5, I literally would not see daylight when it wasn’t the weekend. I’d be commuting in darkness, dawn would happen sometime around the second cup of tea at work, and the sun would set a good while before I was allowed to leave the office. I could get some daylight by going out for lunch, but that was it during the work week.

I’m in Ohio, and it averages out to about 12/12, with winter getting darker around 6PM and the sun not really peeking out until maybe 7AM. Summer’s probably later and earlier, respectively, but I haven’t been up at 6AM during the summer in years.

Hmmm… i may have to give this season a miss. I am NOT a horror movie or game person, psychological or slasher horror movies just don’t sit right in my head. I think it has something to do with having a lot of Empathy and i do not take people, especially young people, dying well. Can anyone give me a yay or nay on whether to watch this or not? I probably watch this first week but like i said i can’t do the horror genre well.

Basically my questions are:
Are the death scenes super graphic?
Does the game have a lot of jump scares or prolonged tension?
will the commentary kill the scariness?
Does someone who doesn’t do horror well be okay to watch this?

Ideally there wouldn’t be the take-back, but it’s pretty hard to break habits for stuff like swearing. Or habits in general, I suppose. I don’t get what’s the deal with swearing, though. A well-placed curse (or even a string of them, when the time calls for it) is nothing to be ashamed of. :)

I watched this on my phone at the gym first so I had to wait to get home to my computer with a big monitor to check, but wow, it really is recognizably Brett Dalton (who played Grant Ward on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D). That’s the only thing I know him from, so this is gonna be interesting to watch with that coloring my view (I’ve only seen a single episode of a Let’s Play of this game, so I have no idea what happens either).

It’s technically incorrect to say that all of them survive in my opinion. Mild spoilerish:technically there is one character who may not necessarily “die” but the after credits of him isn’t something I would call “living” either.

It’s interesting to hear the crew compliment the lipsynch. It actually told me something I didn’t know about myself: I lip-read to supplement my damaged hearing. The graphics are good enough that I was doing that here, and finding it very difficult because the lipsynch was so incredibly overdone. If you’re ever talking with a lip-reader, DO NOT CHANGE HOW YOU SPEAK. Especially don’t exaggerate your lip movements.

Seriously,only Mumbles watched mr robot?We have a cast with three guys who are professionally into computers,and none of them have seen it?We need you three to immediately go to the nerd headquarters and return your nerd cards.

Shamus is correct about his generation not hanging off the cliff like that.Teens in those early slashers were not as abrasive and assholish like the teens in the modern slashers.I blame all the sequels that turned the cast into just a random group that you were simply guessing the order in which they are to be killed off instead of a group of colorful characters where you would actually feel sad when most of them die.

You should watch mr robot.That way you can write your comments about the show in text while you comment on the game in voice.

If you're wondering why I reacted so strongly to the threat of David Cage, it's because I played this.

I dont think thats fair.Really,that game failed because it was rushed,not because of David Cage.The first part of it,the slow build up,works fine.Better than fine even.And its hardly Cages fault that he planned out a trilogy only to be told half way in that he has to cram it all into a single game.

That’s true, but the major problems with the game (in my opinion, anyways) aren’t that the three acts are too rushed, but that the three acts have nearly no thematic fit with each other, and the characters have no thematic continuity to them but are always crammed into “whatever the plot demands them to be at the moment.”

Is it possible that, with more gameplay time to work with, he could have properly motivated the transition from “I’m a cop investigating a murder” to “I’m a cop who has decided to team up with/fall in love with a zombie murderer to kidnap a little girl because a shadowy conspiracy is trying to kidnap her first?” Maybe, but I’m skeptical.

Of course they arent connected,theres a huge jump from the middle of the first act right into the third act.Imagine if in lord of the rings immediately after they left rivendell,frodo and sam found themselves in mordor,while there was an unrelated fight for gondor and an unrelated fight for helms deep,with some characters appearing in both of those with no explanation as to how.

Sure. Like I said, it’s POSSIBLE that you could imagine a well-written, consistent story that gets you from A to implausible B.

But in this case (to me, anyways) it feels like that jump, only suddenly hobbits are all skilled ninja warriors, orcs are armed with hand grenades and assault rifles, and it turns out what we find on Mt. Doom is a rocket ship Frodo and Sam need to launch to take the One Ring into the sun.

To me, by the end, it feels like a completely different game.

Maybe there was a brilliant three-game sweeping arc that would have made it a coherent whole that we’d all admire as a brilliant piece of storytelling. Or maybe if they’d made three games the problems would have been magnified. It’s hard to know.

You can still extrapolate some stuff from the early game.The superpowers thing was established early,but their progression is wonky.You get creepy visions then a single super jump then suddenly kung fu while flying in mid air and shooting hadoukens.You can see how ultimately the first two wouldve led to the third one if only they had some time to develop.Or the cold.First few days it gets colder by a few degrees,and suddenly it jumps to being apocalyptically cold.You can see how the initial chill would lead to that if there was enough time for development.

Though the zombie sex most definitely wouldnt have worked no matter how much time it had to be developed.Screw that part.

To be sliiiiightly fair, Hannah isn’t a perfect saint either; what you missed in the scene before the subtitles got turned on was that Hannah was crushing super-hard on Mike, who has a girlfriend, and the other girls were using this prank to punish her for Hitting On My Man/Best Friend’s Man. (The dudes were just along for the prank, IIRC.) Considering that Hannah was 100% okay with cheating with Mike, they were kinda right in being ticked off.

That said the answer to that is to talk to Hannah, not goddamn humiliate her. Those assholes are 100% responsible for Hannah and Beth’s deaths. Which is the best set-up for a horror story because the whole Washington family is immediately on the suspect list.

Also hearing the team talk about how much they want Josh to die just made me smile. Oh, guys, you have no idea.

No,they arent.I had some pretty embarrassing things happen to me in front of my closest friends,and they had some pretty embarrassing things happened to them in front of me,and at no point did someone run out into the dark woods(or into traffic),not even when stupid drunk.

Though they do share some guilt for not running out to search for the reckless idiot,most of the blame is still on her.

“serial killer”, at this point (first ep) this is not established, or rather the “player” would not know this yet.
Please use strike tags for things that might be spoilers.
It would kinda suck for those that have not seen this game before to have stuff in the next episode spoiled in te comments of this episode.

While there is some replay ability in this game, a lot of the twists and turns and background info does not change.

Is it possible for me to spoil a game I’ve never seen before? I was just making the obvious guess based on the game’s slasher-movie aspirations. I mean, the dude’s chasing teenagers off a cliff with a flamethrower, it’s probably not his first rodeo.

It does a little better than The Walking dead, but still follows a set in stone core plot. What it does do really well is how it works you finding certain info and items into the plot, almost seamlessly.

And the way it handles characters not being in scenes because of death reasons, like Josh said “Everyone can die, and everyone can die” with any number in between and it handles those tricky scenes with lots of “ifs and buts” very well.